Repairing the merit system and the markets
By
Another_Fan,
Posted on: 2010-05-30 23:45 in The Market and Inventions
I like the idea of effectively forcing people into random rolls with a proportion of their merits.
I hoarded merits the first time round with them on heroes (playing a group of ten from 1-50), and they're now sitting unspent on various characters I never play in varying amounts from 70 to 240.
The second time (group of 10 villains) I've spent them as I go and its made me much better off, and had a positive little drop into the market too with a few mid-level LoTG and Miracles I've created. I still have two characters with emergency hoards (240 and 480) just in case I really need a particular recipe one day, so I'm not completely cured of my hoarding tendencies.
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No seriously, I would really like an answer. You now have the choice to educate me and perhaps turn me around to your point of view, thus making your arguements valid and perhaps turning another small portion of the player base around to your way of thinking.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
If you have to ask, you don't understand prob and stat, and are part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
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Or continue to be a ******. Your call.
"I accidently killed Synapse, do we need to restart the mission?" - The Oldest One on Lord Recluses Strike Force
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To give a simple to understand answer:|
Originally Posted by Jake_Summers
No seriously, I would really like an answer. You now have the choice to educate me and perhaps turn me around to your point of view, thus making your arguements valid and perhaps turning another small portion of the player base around to your way of thinking.
Or continue to be a ******. Your call. |
If you have 250 merits you can make 12 random rolls. If the pool you are rolling in has only 32 possible recipes in it the chances that you get the one you are looking for is good though certainly not assured. It's because your sample size is too small.
Most people don't want just a single recipe though. If you have enough merits to buy 3 Pool Cs that's 750 merits or 37.5 rolls. If things work perfectly you'll get 1 of each type recipe and 5 extras. So not only will you get all 3 of the recipes you are after but you'll also have 1 of each of the others many of which you'll also want. The larger your sample size the more likely you are to get all the Pool Cs you want.
The Pool Cs that you don't want can be sold on the market for lots of inf. Inf you can then use to buy the recipes you didn't get making the ramdom rolls.
In the time it takes to buy each pool C recipe you want you would have generated enough recipes to outfit multiple toons. The problem is the time it takes. People want what they want NAO. Most of them don't have the patience to use the market to their own advantage.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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Thank you, that was a reasonable explanation and much more effective way of explaining your views. Now considering what I use merits for, getting specific receipes at the lowest level possible, this route doesn't really work for me. [Though once I get all of the Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharges at level 25 I want, it seems a pretty viable route]. Unfortunately I don't see 10 random spins on the IO table being worth the 200 million or so it takes to buy a LotG +7.5% at 25 though (Do you have any data to prove me wrong?)|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
To give a simple to understand answer:
If you have 250 merits you can make 12 random rolls. If the pool you are rolling in has only 32 possible recipes in it the chances that you get the one you are looking for is good though certainly not assured. It's because your sample size is too small. /snip |
Currently everything in the game works well enough for me to equip all my toons (and mostly on red side at that) in the manner I like (From completely purpled out toons to simple red IO builds).
More tasks that forces you to take a random drop would likely help the markets, but I would not support people being forced to spend their merit in this matter. AE ticket rolls are a good start, another good addition would be the ability to buy random drops with Vanguard merits.
"I accidently killed Synapse, do we need to restart the mission?" - The Oldest One on Lord Recluses Strike Force
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Don't roll on your 50. Park a character at 25, run Oro missions solo for merits, and TFs in groups. I like scrappers and stalkers for this but I hear that kheldians do a good job too with nova form heavily slotted early.|
Originally Posted by Jake_Summers
Thank you, that was a reasonable explanation and much more effective way of explaining your views. Now considering what I use merits for, getting specific receipes at the lowest level possible, this route doesn't really work for me. [Though once I get all of the Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharges at level 25 I want, it seems a pretty viable route]. Unfortunately I don't see 10 random spins on the IO table being worth the 200 million or so it takes to buy a LotG +7.5% at 25 though (Do you have any data to prove me wrong?)
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Works really well.
I also have a couple locked 15s for AE for generating lowbie +regen IOs and even selling the other "junk" bronze roll IOs I make a ton of inf. Only generated three +regens so far, one was for me, sold the other two. Get lots of the Steadfast Def%, -KB, etc along the way.
Best part is that now I can email the IOs I don't have to use friends to move them.
"Hmm, I guess I'm not as omniscient as I thought" -Gavin Runeblade.
I can be found, outside of paragon city here.
Thank you everyone at Paragon and on Virtue. When the lights go out in November, you'll find me on Razor Bunny.
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This! Before the implementation of the Merit system, I'd asked SPECIFICALLY about this. Make it a choice at the time of award.
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Originally Posted by Fulmens
I personally wish you got an "opt-out" system to roll 20 of your new merits when you finished a 20+ merit TF (it pops up a screen saying "Do you want to roll a rare recipe?" immediately), because the system imposes penalties of convenience and knowledge on any action other than hoarding merits. If ignorant people* rolled half the time, it would put an enormous amount of lower-level rolls on the market compared to what we have now.
* I wish I could find a term less insulting-sounding. What I mean is, ignorance can be cured, and we were all ignorant once. |
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But it's so CUUUUTE! |
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Man do you love hyperbole.
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| Not anywhere in my post have I ever said that anyone is owed the fruits of someone else's labor |
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
This player is essentially screwing the market and all the other players out of 11 recipes that otherwise may have made it to the market.
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In there is the basic assumption that @ScrewUMarket owes it to other players to perform in a manner most beneficial to the market/them.
This may not be what you meant but it is more or less implicit in how you said it.
***SEGUE***
Okay! Had a longer reply worked up but actually took the time to go back and re-read the original again. Not sure if I just missed it, blocked it out, Alzheimers or what. But I completely missed the "freebie token" secondary mechanic.
Yes. I was dropped on my head (extensively!) as a child.
Given the secondary mechanic, I could see this working better. Still kludgy, but workable.
My main worry is that this tracking metadata is increasingly abstracted from the main game system and I worry about tracking so people don't get screwed over. I mean, I've had count-tracked badges (Isolator and Zookeeper to name a couple prominent ones) revert counts and the badge disappeared from my list. This would be another level or two more derivative.
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| Given your posts I doubt that you wish to repair the market. You seem to only want self determination to remain in the destructive mode it's in, and I highly doubt that you've gven it much thought. |
Don't make assumptions. A simple misreading of your post sent me off on a snipe hunt here, and I seriously doubt you're any better or worse than I am. So I would ask that you not deign to speak about my ersatz "nefarious" motives
My position (and dislike) of the merit system, if the posts haven't been purged, has been established since before the system was implemented and my predictions for effects on the market pretty much born out if you're looking at the current state of affairs.
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I would guess so. Honestly, while it doesn't help the market any, I believe that if someone wants to hoard merits in the current system and use them to buy a single merit-expensive IO, that's their business.|
Originally Posted by Nethergoat
I don't see a problem there.
Of course, I don't think people should be able to hoard merits to buy specific pieces of loot so we're probably dealing with an unbridgeable philosophical chasm. |
Granted, if the devs are able to reliably engineer a secondary "spec buy" token mechanic as outlined, I'd probably think it was a reasonable compromise.
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The idea of course is to make the thing that makes the market healthier also the thing that is in the best interest of the individual player. Goals are then synonymous. Rolling random (and as a secondary effect increasing market supply) IS what provides the self determination. It's a win/win for the market and the player base. (On a side note this is the same reason that Vigilance is broken, since what is in the best interest of the team, being buffed, eliminates the benefit for the player who is doing the buffing).|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
But it's so CUUUUTE!
I would ask how other players are screwed by player "@ScrewUMarket" spending his earnings how he wishes? Are you screwing other players when you vendor your vendor trash? In there is the basic assumption that @ScrewUMarket owes it to other players to perform in a manner most beneficial to the market/them. This may not be what you meant but it is more or less implicit in how you said it. ***SEGUE*** Okay! Had a longer reply worked up but actually took the time to go back and re-read the original again. Not sure if I just missed it, blocked it out, Alzheimers or what. But I completely missed the "freebie token" secondary mechanic. Yes. I was dropped on my head (extensively!) as a child. Given the secondary mechanic, I could see this working better. Still kludgy, but workable. My main worry is that this tracking metadata is increasingly abstracted from the main game system and I worry about tracking so people don't get screwed over. I mean, I've had count-tracked badges (Isolator and Zookeeper to name a couple prominent ones) revert counts and the badge disappeared from my list. This would be another level or two more derivative. You'd be wrong. Don't make assumptions. A simple misreading of your post sent me off on a snipe hunt here, and I seriously doubt you're any better or worse than I am. So I would ask that you not deign to speak about my ersatz "nefarious" motives My position (and dislike) of the merit system, if the posts haven't been purged, has been established since before the system was implemented and my predictions for effects on the market pretty much born out if you're looking at the current state of affairs. |
I'm glad you went back and re-read the original post. That's the reason we seem to have gotten off the track of market health vs self determination. There's no reason we can't (or shouldn't) have both simultaneously.
I too predicted the current situation with merits and the market at implementation. In fact at one time I suggested something similar to merits. The devs how ever were quite stingy in their final setup (if they had gone with my idea a roll would have been 10 merits and the weighting would have been left alone).
The ability to store up merits is the reason that the low level market is unhealthy. Automatic rewards with a side mechanism for self determination is the way to fix the low - mid level market.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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Again, their property, their business. Does it suck for everyone else? Sure.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
One of the probems with market supply is that people can (and do) WASTE 230 merits buying a single recipe.
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What do you do when a millionaire decides he's going to spend all his money on hookers and blow instead of donating to charity or investing?
Is it a shame? Sure. Is it any of your business? No.
Again, upon rereading your original posts, I find the system proposed kludgy but workable.
A couple things that haven't been addressed:
- What about recipes that go for below the 240 merit mark?
You've set the benchmark for the spec-buy token against the highest valued recipes. But there are other recipes available that could be bought in multiples for the price of the one "expensive" recipe. Or are all spec-buys arbitrarily now 240 merit-equivalent recipes?
- Again, is this system automatic? If so, what happens if a roll is triggered when their recipe inventory is full?
I'd also ask the programmers how easily something like this could be shoehorned on top of the existing system. For myself, at least, there's a certain threshold of difficulty and tradeoff I probably wouldn't accept. I wouldn't implement the system "regardless of what else it hampers/stops/kills". I can't directly define what this "pain threshold" is, as I don't know what the options currently are.
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Agreed. If you really want to help the redside market right now, roll a Stalker, park them in the late 20s/early 30s and do the Spy Hunt arc through Ouroborus. 20 minutes a day = 5 recipe rolls a week.
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Originally Posted by GavinRuneblade
Don't roll on your 50. Park a character at 25, run Oro missions solo for merits, and TFs in groups. I like scrappers and stalkers for this but I hear that kheldians do a good job too with nova form heavily slotted early.
Works really well. |
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Smurphy and TopDoc both did some work on this. Smurphys work was quite a bit earlier so it may be a bit out of date. TopDocs stuff is recent enough that it's probably still entirely valid.|
Originally Posted by Jake_Summers
Thank you, that was a reasonable explanation and much more effective way of explaining your views. Now considering what I use merits for, getting specific receipes at the lowest level possible, this route doesn't really work for me. [Though once I get all of the Luck of the Gambler +7.5% recharges at level 25 I want, it seems a pretty viable route]. Unfortunately I don't see 10 random spins on the IO table being worth the 200 million or so it takes to buy a LotG +7.5% at 25 though (Do you have any data to prove me wrong?)
Currently everything in the game works well enough for me to equip all my toons (and mostly on red side at that) in the manner I like (From completely purpled out toons to simple red IO builds). More tasks that forces you to take a random drop would likely help the markets, but I would not support people being forced to spend their merit in this matter. AE ticket rolls are a good start, another good addition would be the ability to buy random drops with Vanguard merits. |
Bottom line is if you are patient enough to accumulate 20 LotG +7.5s worth of merits you are marginally better off making 250 rolls and being patient at the market than simply buying 20 LotGs out right. There are other high value recipes (Numina, Miracle, and Kinetic Combat to name a few) that off set the randomness. All you have to do is sell them and buy the LotGs that you didn't get with your rolls.
The market let's you do what you are doing now, slighty faster than the way you are doing it, and it leaves you with a tidy sum of left over influence. The only problem you potentially face is the randomness of the RNG but over a large enough sample that randomness is virtually eliminated.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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In a free market economy the millionaire blowing it on hookers and blow (leaving aside the legality issues of doing both those things) would still stimulate the economy.|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
Again, their property, their business. Does it suck for everyone else? Sure.
What do you do when a millionaire decides he's going to spend all his money on hookers and blow instead of donating to charity or investing? Is it a shame? Sure. Is it any of your business? No. Again, upon rereading your original posts, I find the system proposed kludgy but workable. A couple things that haven't been addressed:
You've set the benchmark for the spec-buy token against the highest valued recipes. But there are other recipes available that could be bought in multiples for the price of the one "expensive" recipe. Or are all spec-buys arbitrarily now 240 merit-equivalent recipes?
I'd also ask the programmers how easily something like this could be shoehorned on top of the existing system. For myself, at least, there's a certain threshold of difficulty and tradeoff I probably wouldn't accept. I wouldn't implement the system "regardless of what else it hampers/stops/kills". I can't directly define what this "pain threshold" is, as I don't know what the options currently are. |
If the government (in our game economy this is the devs) wishes to encourage certain behavior they remove regulation and let the free market determine price. If it is a behavior that they wish to discourage they increase taxes and regulations and remove much if not all of the benefit of doing so.
In this case we would be having the devs stimulate the rewards system by changing the way it functions (or more correctly by bringing it into closer parity with the way that the rest of the system functions). Hoarding merits is part of the problem, changing the mechanic so that this isn't possible fixes this problem without removing the self determination aspect.
The mechanics for what you are concerned about all ready exist in the game. We know that it's possible to have more recipes than you "can hold" because of the market roll backs that happened early. The devs could potentially use this mechanic as a merit earned recipe overflow.
The old claim recipe window could also be brought back. When you exceed the cap a nag window opens and won't close until you reduce the number of recipes in storage to accomdate the incoming recipes (and no this won't be a problem since merits are rewarded at the end of content so you wouldn't have to worry about playing with the pop up open). All you would have to do is get to the market/vendor to sell or delete some junk recipes, claim your new Pool C recipes and close the window to continue.
-Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. - Albert Einstein.
-I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei
-When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty. - Thomas Jefferson
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There are other factors in this. If you're level 50, random rolling is probably better, although when I did my research on a sample of about 3000 merits, I'd have been better specific buying by a long way as I rolled crap. (I'd have needed to make 8M a roll profit at the time I did it, and actually made about 6.5). It was also a lot more work and clogged my market slots for weeks.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Smurphy and TopDoc both did some work on this. Smurphys work was quite a bit earlier so it may be a bit out of date. TopDocs stuff is recent enough that it's probably still entirely valid.
Bottom line is if you are patient enough to accumulate 20 LotG +7.5s worth of merits you are marginally better off making 250 rolls and being patient at the market than simply buying 20 LotGs out right. There are other high value recipes (Numina, Miracle, and Kinetic Combat to name a few) that off set the randomness. All you have to do is sell them and buy the LotGs that you didn't get with your rolls. The market let's you do what you are doing now, slighty faster than the way you are doing it, and it leaves you with a tidy sum of left over influence. The only problem you potentially face is the randomness of the RNG but over a large enough sample that randomness is virtually eliminated. |
If you've accumulated 600 merits by level say 38 and want to slot your set IOs at that point, you may well be better off by a long way specific buying one or two due to the lvl 38 stuff you roll being worth so much less than the level 50 equivalents.
My old posi running toon was a perma level 17, and I know for sure that spending 240 merits (about 4 hours work) on a lvl 20 miracle unique which I was selling for 150-200M was better than random rolling.
The solution of forced rolling would mean I never did a posi or synapse TF till I hit 30+ as most of the pool Cs at level 15-20 are a waste of space. Hence the solution I proposed with tokens and a limited capacity for storing them. In fact it might cause me to leave the game as I use the TFs to get to 30 and doing them effectively without rewards would suck. Allowing unlimited storage of merits till a set level was reached (30 or 35 ?) would sort this issue out.
I do a mix of random rolling and merit buying. What have I merit purchased recently ? Mainly pool As that just don't turn up with any frequency like kinetic combat dam/end and level 21 performance shifter +end. The only 200 sized purchase I've made recently was a redside basilisk's gaze quad, where there were none available recipes or crafted at any level.
Removing the ability to merit buy specific recipes would also open up some potentially horrible market coups. At the moment, there is at least a safety net.
It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba
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It's not large enough to be "data" but I goaded a guy into making random rolls on three of his characters yesterday- each level 50, each with about 15 rolls' worth of merits. If I recall, it ended up being 300 million+, around 150 million, and something like 500 million [there was an LoTG 7.5 , a Numina Regen, and two Impervium Armors in that set for starters.] Blueside numbers for value, by the way.
| Unfortunately I don't see 10 random spins on the IO table being worth the 200 million or so it takes to buy a LotG +7.5% at 25 though (Do you have any data to prove me wrong?) |
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A thought. Might it not be more elegant to leave the merit store as is, and instead divide current merit rewards so that some portion are kept as existing merits (character-level, stackable, used to purchase items from the merit store) and some portion are switched to "roll points" (account-level, trigger random rolls as soon as threshold is reached)? This allocation could be done a number of ways - split half and half, or up to the first 20 merits as roll points, or arcs reward roll points and TFs reward merits, or whatever.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
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This page should help.|
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Smurphy and TopDoc both did some work on this. Smurphys work was quite a bit earlier so it may be a bit out of date. TopDocs stuff is recent enough that it's probably still entirely valid.
Bottom line is if you are patient enough to accumulate 20 LotG +7.5s worth of merits you are marginally better off making 250 rolls and being patient at the market than simply buying 20 LotGs out right. There are other high value recipes (Numina, Miracle, and Kinetic Combat to name a few) that off set the randomness. All you have to do is sell them and buy the LotGs that you didn't get with your rolls. The market let's you do what you are doing now, slighty faster than the way you are doing it, and it leaves you with a tidy sum of left over influence. The only problem you potentially face is the randomness of the RNG but over a large enough sample that randomness is virtually eliminated. |
To be honest, I'm not sure if rolling is better than buying. Rolling and getting a numina 50 +/+ isn't the same as picking a numina 30 +/+ in terms of market worth.
In theory, rolling monetarily works out to be way better than buying, but the major problem with rolling is that if you are seriously considering maximizing your return on merit investment, you must also craft the good drops before you sell them.
This means that for the drops you are getting, perhaps 10-30% of them are craft worthy. Maybe more, it's just a WAG. That means there's the salvage and crafting overhead attached rollling - potentially 11x more overhead than just buying a single recipe and listing it on the market.
For me, I have to balance that with the convenience and 'down time' of NOT running another TF. In some ways it also is easier since I have too many merits to deal with. Blasting away 200-250 merits in one go is alot easier to manage than waiting on all sorts of bids because I decided to roll 500 merits to avoid the cap.
Selling a specific crafted IO, 200-250 merits -> 200-350M is good enough for me versus spending an extra 15 minutes per session running around and dumping recipes/salvage because my marketing pipeline/salvage storage is clogged up. 15 minutes is 10-15 merits for me so sometimes rolling doesn't feel as fun as fighting.
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Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
the Pope could easily buy things from Osama Bin Laden on Ebay and neither one would have to know who sold or bought it
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*runs*
I don't agree that anyone should be forced to roll their merits.
Also increasing a random roll from 20 to 25 is a horrible idea, as already many toons have fractions of a random roll sitting on various toons. Increasing it above 20 would make that situation WORSE.
The best suggestions would be to:
1. Decrease the cost of a random roll to 15,
2. let anyone choose the EXACT level of the random rolls they make,
3. award one merit for every non-newspaper mission completed,
4. if an arc rewards merits give everyone on the team the full amount PROVIDED they were there for every mission of an arc (whether it's their mission or not),
5. increase the number of drops each team member gets while you are on a team.
6. Finally ALL merits should be in a pool account wide. So that you don't have fractions of merits on various toons or alts that don't get played for weeks, months at a time.
AE tickets should be left as is. This aspect is one of the few reasons left to use that retarded rp system (IMO).
And finally, merge the ******* markets.
My suggestions are all that need to be done. AGAIN:
I don't agree that anyone should be forced to roll their merits. If a person wants to specifically save for ONE specific IO, that is their business.
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The problem comes when Rube Goldberg comes back from the dead and asks for royalties on the system so implemented.
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Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
A thought. Might it not be more elegant to leave the merit store as is, and instead divide current merit rewards so that some portion are kept as existing merits (character-level, stackable, used to purchase items from the merit store) and some portion are switched to "roll points" (account-level, trigger random rolls as soon as threshold is reached)? This allocation could be done a number of ways - split half and half, or up to the first 20 merits as roll points, or arcs reward roll points and TFs reward merits, or whatever.
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More complex from a user perspective, but perhaps less so from a developer perspective. Also, doesn't require the devs to discard or alter prior work, which they tend to be loath to do (and with good reason).|
Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
The problem comes when Rube Goldberg comes back from the dead and asks for royalties on the system so implemented.
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I may have mentioned before that I relish the freedom to propose changes which would end up doing exactly what they are intended to do, to the benefit of the majority of the players, but which would bring out frothy rage because they seem punitive. The developers don't have that freedom, the poor sods.
@SPTrashcan
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Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
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Broken for whom ? |
Originally Posted by Miladys_Knight
Yep, it's broken and here's why:
1) Lack of low - mid level pool c supply (because you can hoard merits.) 2) The ability to waste multiple random rolls worth of merits on a single IO (self determination) 3) Mission Architect (diluting/skewing the rewards pool) 4) XP smoothing. 5) Repair of the inf exemplar "bug" (50s generating yet more inf) We really need a repair for issue 1, 2, and 3 to solve the problem. The solution - Increase the merit cost of a random roll by *5 merits (to 25) [bear with me and don't freak out there's a reason]. Eliminate hoarding by causing a recipe to be rolled everytime 25 merits (or a multiple thereof) are earned. This will increase the supply of low - mid level pool C recipes. Introduce a slider on the "merit ticker" that allows you to select any level between +3 to your current level (because that's what you can slot) all the way down to level 10. When the merit ticker reaches 25 a random Pool C is generated at the level the slider is set at. * once 20 Pool C recipes have been generated (either by that toon or account wide. It doesn't really matter since we can email things to our other characters now [provided they are in the same faction, a notion that still strikes me as patently ridiculous, the Pope could easily buy things from Osama Bin Laden on Ebay and neither one would have to know who sold or bought it]) give the character/account a "token" that can be redeemed at the merit vendor for any 1 Pool C recipe of any level desired. Remove Gold rolls from the MA and make Merit content/boss defeats outside MA the only way to generate Pool Cs. Then increase the ticket cost for Bronze rolls by 25% Poof, all of our current woes are lessened or eliminated. We retain self determination for the market whiners, increase the level spread of generated Pool Cs and the number since fewer merits are consistantly wasted/remain unspent, and remove one of the most annoying problems created by MA. |
I really wasn't pleased when merits were put in, and from my point of view they still leave much to be desired but you have to ask just who does this really benefit ?
The person who holds their merits and rolls at 50 is enjoying things immensely now. What they have is a nice concentrated market for buying and selling their items. Whats more they are much more likely to get top dollar for their items than they ever were before and much more than they would if they generate off level recipes. Even with supply at nearly zero, off level items are not going anywhere near where they need to be, to make it worthwhile to produce them. If you add in the fact that they also move more slowly well its about zero benefit to people on the production side to get items they are not familiar with and aren't particularly set up to gain maximum advantage from.
The person who buys particular recipes minimizes their effort in realizing their gain and insures that they get just as good a price, or better on average than the person random rolling without taking a chance. If you are someone who doesn't play often enough or generate enough merits that you can be confident of approaching the statistical averages this is plainly a giant benefit.
The people that these suggestions would most seem to benefit are those with large numbers of alts with large numbers of market slots and the inf to do bid sniping on those alts and slots.
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Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
I don't agree that anyone should be forced to roll their merits.
Also increasing a random roll from 20 to 25 is a horrible idea, as already many toons have fractions of a random roll sitting on various toons. Increasing it above 20 would make that situation WORSE. The best suggestions would be to: 1. Decrease the cost of a random roll to 15, 2. let anyone choose the EXACT level of the random rolls they make, 3. award one merit for every non-newspaper mission completed, 4. if an arc rewards merits give everyone on the team the full amount PROVIDED they were there for every mission of an arc (whether it's their mission or not), 5. increase the number of drops each team member gets while you are on a team. 6. Finally ALL merits should be in a pool account wide. So that you don't have fractions of merits on various toons or alts that don't get played for weeks, months at a time. AE tickets should be left as is. This aspect is one of the few reasons left to use that retarded rp system (IMO). And finally, merge the ******* markets. My suggestions are all that need to be done. AGAIN: I don't agree that anyone should be forced to roll their merits. If a person wants to specifically save for ONE specific IO, that is their business. |
Completely agree on 1-5, 6 I would love as well but unfortunately the devs have decided to give merits as a vet award.
Quote:
Hey, as a retarded rper I take derpity derp derp derp.|
Originally Posted by Aura_Familia
This aspect is one of the few reasons left to use that retarded rp system (IMO).
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But seriously, if there's one suggestion that seems both popular and reasonable to implement it's being able to select your own roll level. The rest is nice, but as long as people don't roll their merits, there'll still be a lack of supply of pool C/D recipes. Switching over to 100% forced rolls is, well, let's call it unlikely due to pitchforks and torches and leave it at that - but some automatic generation of pool C/D recipes would be helpful.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
Quote:
give the vets something else. they won't cry.
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Originally Posted by Another_Fan
Completely agree on 1-5, 6 I would love as well but unfortunately the devs have decided to give merits as a vet award.
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Blazara Aura LVL 50 Fire/Psi Dom (with 125% recharge)
Flameboxer Aura LVL 50 SS/Fire Brute
Ice 'Em Aura LVL 50 Ice Tank
Darq Widow Fortune LVL 50 Fortunata (200% rech/Night Widow 192.5% rech)--thanks issue 19!
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